The Agri-Cultural Imagination: Present and Future Imaginations of Alternative Agriculture, the Human-non-Human Relationship, and the Impact of Time

Firstly, this thesis aims to highlight a form of alternative agriculture through an anthropological lens, through an exploration of alternative farming practices, focusing on what is known as Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Through ethnographic fieldwork carried out over 2 years I learned about the motivations, fears, hopes, imagined presents and futures and ways of seeing the world of those who involve themselves with CSA practices. Secondly, in the broadest sense I want to highlight the role the human imagination plays in constructing our present(s) and future(s). Our imaginations are powerful tools, enabling people to see the present in many different ways, and project themselves into multiple contingent futures. We rely on it to construct ourselves and much of the world around us. And so, I believe for us to understand anything about what it means to be human we must understand how and what we imagine. Thirdly, I discuss the human-non-human relationship, in a general “beyond the human” sense but also with specific reference to plants. While having somewhat of a renaissance in anthropological discourse, there is still a lacuna of knowledge concerned with the relationships we have with the non-humans of this world. An emphasis of much alternative agriculture is the nurturing of the connection between the human and the non-human and CSA is no exception. Thus, CSA makes an excellent opportunity to better understand some aspects of these relationships, particularly in the urban environment. All of this is framed through larger scale issues with a major focus on human induced climate change and its very real effects on the present world but also the myriad of potential future effects the continued acceleration of climate change will have